


Sins of the Father

by archea2



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: BAMF Lestrade, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Paternal Lestrade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-19
Updated: 2013-04-19
Packaged: 2017-12-08 22:21:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/766694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At 221B, Lestrade observes a clue and faces another Holmes - a much less amenable one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sins of the Father

**Author's Note:**

> First written to fill a kinkmeme prompt that asked for paternal!Lestrade rescuing Sherlock. Not compliant with canon and its portrayal of Sherlock's actual dad.
> 
> The journalist-and-worm case comes from the ACD canon - Watson alludes to it in "The Problem of Thor Bridge".

All the clocks in Marylebone are striking five when Lestrade shoos the police car off on its way, aware that this is an unfashionable hour for paying Baker Street a visit. Usually - a best-case scenario usually, that is - Lestrade spends the hour at his desk, communing with a styrofoam cup. But this, as he texted Sherlock thirty minutes ago, is an emergency tea-break. The  _Daily Mail_ ’s pet reporter has just been found stark staring raving mad; staring, in fact, into a matchbox that contained a type of worm unknown even to Ken Russell. And Lestrade's superiors, in view of the late Persano’s press affiliation, are more than anxious for Lestrade to box up the case, fast and clean.  
  
He steps up to 221B, raises his hand to the bell... and stills it. The street door, he can see, is the slightest bit ajar. Not enough for passers-by to spot the breach, but enough that any visitor long acquainted with the place will notice it. Lestrade inspects the keyhole for signs of violation and finds none. Cautiously, he splays his gloved hand against the door and coaxes it open, letting himself in before he moves it back, ensuring that it merely clicks.  
  
He pads up the steps, glancing at the coat hung on the landing. It's sandy beige, cashmere by the look of it, and cannot possibly belong to John Watson unless he’s taken to stilts and grown another set of shoulders since Lestrade last saw him. No Mrs H. in sight, but the door to the lads’ common room is partially open, too. Lestrade can hear two voices, both male, both deep, two runnels of sound merging now and then in that clear-cut drawl his da used to call the "Rupert voice". Could this be —  
  
He snags a side glimpse. No. Sherlock’s visitor has his back turned to him, but Lestrade can spot the thinning grey hair, the perceptible slouch. The man belongs to his generation. Bit older, maybe. Larger, too – the hefty back is blocking Lestrade's view to Sherlock.  
  
"— never said you were coming to town." Sherlock’s voice is its even self, but to Lestrade’s ear it sounds oddly toneless.  
  
"What if I had? Do you think I still expect you to comply with basic social decencies, Sherlock? Of course, since this is you, I should have downed the ante. Should have anticipated having to track down my own son, not even to a City drug market, but to a City hospital  _morgue."_  
  
Holy smoke. Lestrade’s job has sped him to many murky corners, but if there’s one particular mudhole he has always tried to sidestep, it’s this. His team’s family issues are and must remain off-track muddles – he's made it a ruling principle at work, and they know it. Bad enough that he had to walk on Anderson and Donovan last Monday, probing the ins-and-outs of cooperation in the Property Room. That sight was _anything_ but proper.   
  
And neither is this. The elusive worm will have to wait: if Sherlock catches him eavesdropping on what Lestrade suspects is a slick-rehearsed number on the Holmes scene, there will be hell to pay in this life and the next. Lestrade takes his first hushed step stairward.  
  
Then remembers the street door, and retraces the step.  
  
"I’ve told you, Father. My work —"  
  
"Your what? As if you even knew the word's meaning. Oh yes, I’ve read about your, your – ‘deductions’, is that what you call it now ? I call it a sterling excuse to live off your brother’s spare money and slake your dirty little cravings. It’s no longer drugs, then, Sherlock, is it ? Pity. At least, drugs kept you apart from the public eye."  
  
The voice is softly, hideously compelling – musk oil dripping from the prick point of a knife. Lestrade waits for Sherlock to strike back with his own cutting words, but nothing comes out of the blind angle, nothing but silence.

Lestrade tries to lick his lips and finds that his tongue is dry.  
  
"God almighty, look at you. Look at this pigsty around you. Is this what you’ve come to, Sherlock? You were Sunday’s child when we made you, your mother and I. We gave you everything, _everything_ – named you, schooled you, shaped you – before you cut a run and failed us. Perhaps I should have schooled you harder, boy. Yes, look at it now, look well. Did you really think I’d missed it?"  
  
The bulky shape suddenly moves to Lestrade’s right, letting him crack a peep. Sherlock is seated, but the place he occupies is not his usual, central chair, the one that Lestrade makes a point of appropriating during the drugs busts. Sherlock is huddled in John’s armchair, closer to the window, and Lestrade, with an unbidden pang of deja vu, sees that Sherlock is wearing his coat indoors, his legs hugged against his chest. The chair is half facing the door, meaning that Sherlock would be looking at him full front if he had not turned his head to stare, his eyes fixed and intent, at the marble chimney. Or rather at something long and thin, tucked along the farther edge of the sill.  
  
"Childhood memento, Sherlock? How sentimental. Though I dare say _you_ lack what it takes to use it on anything live. Is that all you’re capable of, boy?" The voice drops to a silky hiss. "Keep to a society of corpses? No wonder your mother felt she had to join up before her time."  
  
In the days when he was known to most as Greg, Lestrade's teacher had assigned her class a Colour Project. Draw a list of feelings, children, and give each of them a colour. Greg's answers had been solidly consensual. Of course joy was yellow, of course hope was blue. Grief, black. Sadness, light black. And anger, as everyone knew, was that deep, deep red once known as worm scarlet, only Greg didn't know the name and Miss called it vermillion.  
  
Well, Miss was wrong. Rage feels furnace  _white_ , and Lestrade is three strides into the room before he knows it.  
  
"Enough." He doesn't bother to keep his voice steady. "You, out. Move the fuck out of here."  
  
For one instant, one rewarding flash-still, he watches the other flinch at his words. Then the man angles his head slowly in his direction, sizing him up. Lestrade returns the favour. He can see no trace of blood sympathy there, nothing that would point out this sensuous, saturnine face as an inspiration for Sherlock’s. Granted, Holmes has clear cunning eyes and must have been strikingly handsome once, in a patrician style. But he is also heavy-set, his heels dug into Mrs Hudson’s carpet as if his flesh was a law of gravity in its own right.

A hedonist gone rotten.  
  
A sadist.  
  
"Ah. You have more... animated friends, I see. Though their language hardly does you credit. Or their professional ethos." The stone-clear eyes spider across Lestrade's M&S trench, catching his repressed gesture to his breast pocket. "I’m less acquainted with the police than you are, Sherlock, but I do know about trespass to land and verbal assault. Detective Inspector Lestrade might be wise to take his own advice. Now."  
  
Not a fool, no. But not a genius like Sherlock. Geniuses may well add up to sadists, as Donovan reminds him daily, but they are fast-thinking sadists. Holmes looks the blow-by-blow type. Which could play to Lestrade's advantage.  
  
"Yeah? Well, I know all about emotional abuse, Mr Holmes. That, and the laws that punish it. You say I’m leaving, you’re leaving with me. Wanna see which of us leaves the station with a restraining order?"  
  
It’s the truth, nothing but the truth. And it’s bluff. And Holmes knows it, and knows that Lestrade knows. Sherlock’s status at the Met is too controversial for Lestrade’s colleagues to take such direct measures on the mere strength of his word. And Sherlock (still motionless, still gazing at his own chimney as if trying to morph into the marble shell) will never file a complaint - not where it might be accessible to Sally and her peers.  
  
"You ludicrous little man." Holmes’s voice has slipped back to musk. "What on earth brought my son to seek your tutelage? Apart from a common  _penchant_  for cadavers, that is."  
  
It strikes him, then - the answer, the blow ahead. It’s a shot in the dark, since he knows so little about the man apart from his vicious connection to Sherlock, but it’s all the ammunition Lestrade has.   
  
"Oh, we share something else, sir."  
  
He can see the man stir at his change of tone – but then the contempt is back, in the plump purse of lips, the icy voice. Fool.   
  
"A dirty flat?"  
  
"No, Mr Holmes. Your elder son’s private phone number."  
  
And there it is. Now he can tell (except he won’t, he’ll never tell) John Watson that he knows what John felt a year ago, watching another old sadist topple to the floor at Sherlock’s feet. It has been thirty years since Lestrade pulled the trigger on a gun, and that was to win a stuffed squirrel and Mary McGranger's eternal love at the Goose Fair. Now, looking at Holmes’s face, he knows how it feels when your shot goes home.   
  
It feels _magnificent_.

* * *

  
  
He follows the other man to the landing stairs, not once taking his eyes off him. Two dim steps down, Holmes turns and opens his mouth. The soft wet sound reminds Lestrade of winter Sundays, the country silt sucking at your boots all the way to church, so you had to wipe them twice before getting your lunch.  
  
"Don’t," he raps out. "You know your way out, Mr Holmes – keep to that knowledge. If I stumble on you in this flat, anywhere near this flat, I’ll" – and he can’t keep the wry grin from his voice – "with all due respect, sir, I’ll bust the _pants_ out of you."  
  
He waits until the door has shut Holmes out before he heads back into the living-room. Sherlock is seated exactly where they left him, knees drawn to his chest, but his head is slightly raised and Lestrade knows that in a few seconds he will be struggling through the chilled torpor. He knows, too, what sensation will kick in first, painful as the blood when it floods back into a numbed body: the shame, the resentment, the – oh, sodding hell – childish self-contempt because of that one signal of distress, the first since a past that was well on its way toward oblivion.  
  
Only a matter of seconds.   
  
Lestrades crosses the space to the chair and squeezes himself firmly on the arm, his eyes on the window as he places a hand on Sherlock’s cheek and guides the stiff young face to the bend of his shoulder, letting his other arm encircle Sherlock’s back.Then he rests his chin on the dark curls and begins to speak.

  
He starts with figures. Percentages, quotas, statistics, an abstract parade, delivered in a voice as effortlessly bland as he can make it. Numbers fresh from his yearly report to whatever deity once decreed that Met inspectors live on printed forms and freeze-dried coffee, yet the one report tmaking all the others worth it. He takes Sherlock through clearance rates and conviction rates, and all the rates that would have remained wishful thinking without Sherlock.  
  
A dry language, but it must do the trick because Lestrade can hear Sherlock breathe, abandoning his weight to the hug. He tightens his grasp and moves on to the people.   
  
He tells Sherlock about the woman he saw two weeks earlier, the mother found in her kitchen, unstitching her dead child’s striped school scarf with a kitchen peeler. Holding Sherlock to him, in a taut warm embrace, he says how her hands stilled when she learnt about the arrest. He speaks of the woman from Cardiff who sent his team a blank e-mail on the anniversary date of her kidnapping, and how they all knew the address bearing her name  _was_  the message.   
  
Protected witnesses walking out after the trial, blinking up at the brilliant air. Mrs Hudson telling him about her nightmares, the four knocks at her bedroom door, always the same - three and a halt followed by the dull _thump_ of the chopper - and how they ceased.  
  
His own nightmares, and how they ceased.  
  
Next thing he kows, he is sending his team a mental plea for forgiveness and telling Sherlock about the Bust Bingo.   
  
"They have cards, you see, with all the things they expect to find here. Last time here, Sally was leading with all but three squarescrossed – Buttered Fingers, Dario Argento and Gerbils. Anderson and Hopkins are way behind." He pauses. "Can’t deny them their bit of fun, but I’ve noticed there’s one item missing on their cards – and that's the first you’d expect. »  
  
"Spare brain for a loan?" a muffled voice asks his shirt collar.  
  
Lestrade chuckles, raising his chin. Across the window, across the street, John Watson is legging it to 221B, a Tesco bag swinging jauntily at his side. And so he describes John to Sherlock, today’s John, happy in his secured insecure life, a far far cry from the furtive cripple he first saw slumped on this chair.  
  
"You're keeping him alive, Sherlock. You keep them all alive. Do you see? _Alive_. »

He drops his arms gently and slides down from the chair.  
  
Sherlock leans back, observing him with what Lestrade can only identify as a lost scowl.

"Are you?" he says tersely.  
  
Lestrade replays his monologue in his head, searching for...oh. Obviously.  
  
"Christ, yes. Haven’t been so proud of anyone since my Cathy got her A-levels."  
  
He will, in retrospect, thank John for that last-minute fumble after his keys. That necessary tick of time, letting Lestrade catch the incautious smile and hoard it in a corner of his mind - not to be gloated over or put to use, no, merely as a memento that Sherlock might need him in one more capacity than he does Sherlock.  
  
By the time John closes the door on a lusty ‘I’m home!’, Sherlock is dissecting the British educative system with scathing gusto. And Lestrade is putting the kettle on against a homey-cosy chat on dead journalists, Worms Anonymous, and many other such invigorating topics.

FINIS


End file.
